Speaking of mints, my original idea was to temper chocolate and flavor it with mint and pour it into my molds that are produced from my own carvings. The original carvings would all be common Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols. See? Minty chocolate goodness in Egyptian hieroglyphic form. I pass them out all over the place.

But then the single-source chocolate was so good by itself it would be criminal to ruin it with nasty chemical flavor. So now I have a ton of nasty chemical flavors and no practical use for them. Although children report they like the orange. Children got no class a'toll.

But this is a political thread innit. Observation. If the so-called Tea Party were to morph into an actual political party and not remain a simple insurgent movement with no precise leadership, and if the usually screechy and easily excitable Palin were to emerge as its leader, then they could re-name it the Mamma Grizzly party, and go the way of the Bull Moose.

The Lefties are mad and throwing their usual tantrum because they didn't get their way (of course, they throw it when they do get their way, too).

DeMint and Coburn have been the freedom fighters through all this going back to fighting the free spending under Dubya. If they can hold the line (Coburn for Senate Majority Leader and DeMint for Whip, anyone?), you'll see Republican control of the Senate in '12.

You know what I'd like to hear from Washington DC? "Crickets" - that would tell me they are not screwing up something.

Or they could start dismantling some unnecessary depts. And fix one thing like social security. I was talking to an elderly uncle today and he said they could start by putting back the money [$3-$4 Trillion] they "borrowed" from the social security tax receipts.

I'm a big fan of them walking in the front door cutting every single department, defense included, by 5%. I've never been a part of any organization, military or civilian, that couldn't find 5% of crap to cut away.

Oh great. Another reason to call Tea Partiers violent. I overheard a group of old lefties moaning about the "emotional" and "visceral" aspects of the right ("Mama Grizzly" analogies are scary, etc., etc., etc.).

Same here. Save yourself, your kids, your family. Enough people do that and the world doesn't need saving.

DeMint kinda addresses a problem - how much can get done in Washington that is worthwhile and effective. The backscratching, pork barrel, out of control spending has been going on so long and is so deep seated, it's going to be a hard habit to break.

Many of the left wing pundits have been complaining that the system is broken because tea party candidates were able to win nominations and win elections. That's democracy, not something broken. All the insider, loose speding politics, that's what's broken.

They first need is to stop the FED from its inflating of the currency at mega speed. That is the hole in the USS Middle Class that is taking on the water to sink us.Meanwhile while the DemonRats and the RINOs have taken all of the lifeboats for themselves and their billionaire friends. Will the new guys try to prevent this intentional sinking of the Middle Class's boat, or will they sell out for a small lifeboat space too?

The system is broken because both parties serve the same constituents, their true constitutents: the wealthy and powerful. Both parties are the parties of war and welfare for the rich.

You seem to be the most enlightened one around here, RC. Please inform us of a system of government that has existed, ever, that has not been in some way in the hip pocket of the rich and powerful. Please. We need you now more than ever.

You seem to perceive that you exist on a plane outside the one the rest of us mortals inhabit. How do things get done up there in Valhalla? Odin doesn't have his own hand in just about everything?

Edutcher - "DeMint and Coburn have been the freedom fighters through all this going back to fighting the free spending under Dubya. If they can hold the line (Coburn for Senate Majority Leader and DeMint for Whip, anyone?)"==================

Hate to break it to you, but Republicans did not get a majority in the Senate. O'Donnell and Angle assured that. I think Coburn is a real leader, while Demint is a seeker of favor with his direction determined by his thumb to the wind.

Coburn is respected, but Demint is looked on like Lindsay Graham is - an opportunistic, camera-loving bomb thrower.

In any case, Republican leadership will be working with Senate Majority Leader "Dirty Harry" Reid.

Thanks to Angle. Even more than ditsy Christine - Sharron Angle should be a stark lesson to right wing true believers that ideological purity and running against a hated Senator isn't enough if voters determine that the hardcore right candidate is unfit for office.The notion that voters want someone even less fit for high office than they consider themselves to be, trumps ideology.

"She may be unfit, but will vote as Goddess Palin directs..." wasn't persuasive to Harry Reid-hating Nevadans.

The system is broken because both parties serve the same constituents, their true constitutents: the wealthy and powerful. Both parties are the parties of war and welfare for the rich.

And, so what? What makes you think that this is different than any other society at any other time in human history? What you've described is often called "the human condition." Some surprise that the system serves the rich and powerful! Know any place or time where that wasn't true?

Oh, I'm hardly saving the world. I'm just standing on the sidelines, bitching...fearful and wondering when violence will start breaking out in the streets and across the country.

Don't worry. that's not going to happen in America. Lefties have been predicting that kind of stuff forever. Partly, they're hoping it will happen. Sometimes, the left tries to make it happen, aka, the SLA. Starting a race war is one of the favorite fantasies of the far left. Charlie Manson was hoping for that one, too.

America is the land of the middle class. The middle class isn't interested in street fighting. Blacks are becoming middle class, so they're rapidly phasing out of the leftist plan for class and race warfare.

I'm just standing on the sidelines, bitching...fearful and wondering when violence will start breaking out in the streets and across the country.

You know you make an excellent point. I mean look at all those package bombs in Europe being sent to budget cutters and austerity proponents like Sarkozy and Merkel by leftists who are upset they won't be getting as much government largese.

I'm a big fan of them walking in the front door cutting every single department, defense included, by 5%. I've never been a part of any organization, military or civilian, that couldn't find 5% of crap to cut away.

This.

Plus they could say do 5% this year and another 5% reduction for the next 4 years.

DeMintt gave very good advice. I hope that the newbies listen and heed.

MadisonMan said..." I'm a big fan of them walking in the front door cutting every single department, defense included, by 5%. "

This is in general a good idea, although the number has to vary by department. But in practice you have to be in a position to act if you get unsatisfactory results. I recall hearings from the Reps effort to enact 1% across the board cuts, which resulted in every departemnt head explaining that that 1% was what kept it's department running.

Until you have someone who can respond "ok, then we'll get rid of the other 99%" you can't enforce the plan. You have to be able to get rid of the people who refuse to act, and Obama's not going to cooperate.

Please inform us of a system of government that has existed, ever, that has not been in some way in the hip pocket of the rich and powerful.

That's easy.

It began with the forging of the Great Rings. Three were given to the Elves; immortal, wisest and fairest of all beings. Seven, to the Dwarf Lords, great miners and craftsmen of the mountain halls. And nine, nine rings were gifted to the race of Men, who above all else desire power.

I'm wondering how soon the republican establishment is going to send their staffers to start to help the current new crop of freshman congressman set up shop to spy on them. The leftards do it and I imagine the republican establishment does as well.

Credit where credit is due. McConnell held the Republicans together in united opposition to Obama's programs. And that includes the Maine sisters, McCain, Graham, et al. That's no mean feat, and he deserves credit for that.

I highly doubt that DeMint would have been able to do so. I like him, and I like the vast majority of his ideas. But the skill set for leader is not the same as that required to be an ideological leader.

Save yourself, your kids, your family. Enough people do that and the world doesn't need saving.

Screwtape agrees:

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don't, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father's house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there.

We've all known people so full of love and concern and compassion for humanity, that they have none left over for real people.

Surprisingly, not everyone on the Left is oblivious. I read this comment in a Daily Beast thread about the MSNBC meltdown:

"Blue-eyed blues

"I get it now, I know why America has had it with liberals. I was at what was suppose to be a victory party for a local democratic politician last night... it was a concession speech. MSNBC was on TV half of the room cheered some of the comments by the MSNBC team while others were embarrased. Except when Bachman was on - they all cheered when he called her in a trance, then she dropped the big one.... the tingly feeling comment smacked Matthews and silenced the room. Right then I knew why America looks down on us libs and the night just fell apart from there.

"But that was not the worst of it. As results from the rest of Florida came in, my fellow dems got ugly. The continuous racial remarks about Marco Rubio and Allen West got down right ugly, words I would never utter myself and was shocked that democrats would speak them so openly in public. Then came the results that Lizbeth Benacquisto, a republican state senate candidate had won. She got national press for responding to her opponentsTV adds about abortion and rape with her own rape expirience. I was shocked with the remarks from a prominent local lesbian who told our little group in quite graphic terms of what she would do to her. That was it - I left the party.

"After the results from last night, the comments of MSNBC, the people I thought were my fellow dems and dreading having to go in to work today and face little miss tea party in my office I was close to calling in sick. But I held my head up and dragged my ass in, I got my coffee and waited for that smug little Palin wannabee to let me have it. Instead she came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder and asked how I was doing. I sat in my office and realized she has treated me with much more respect than I had been treating her but I was just not open to see it.

"I get it, there is a reason why we lost last night, there is a reason why msnbc is getting whooped by fox, if we continue to go down that path we will lose everything and I don't want to be like the vile people I was with last night or the pompous panel on msnbc. I'm not joining the tea party or anything but we in the democratic party better use last night as a reality check because the rest of America is leaving us behind."

I have seen too much of the same to jump in with an immediate opinion, but history does tend to caution an optimistic view to all this save the country mantra. That said, I would love to see 10% cut from all kinds of projects including the Defense budget.

Edutcher - "DeMint and Coburn have been the freedom fighters through all this going back to fighting the free spending under Dubya. If they can hold the line (Coburn for Senate Majority Leader and DeMint for Whip, anyone?)"==================

Hate to break it to you, but Republicans did not get a majority in the Senate.

TSL is still my favorite Lewis novel. Screwtape's take on marriage is especially fun.

I don't understand Christianity very well but C. S. Lewis makes me think I understand his kind of Christianity. I think his arguments are mostly very good, and the occasional lame one stands out by contrast.

Example: his argument for the divinity of Christ in Mere Christianity was that anyone who said he was God and wasn't God has to be crazy, and Jesus wasn't crazy, ergo... And my reaction was, Whatever, Clive--are you telling me that Julius Caesar was God? After all, the Roman Senate said he was a God, anyone who said that when it wasn't true would be crazy, the Roman Senate WASN'T crazy, ergo...

And nowadays many people think you are crazy if you merely say you are in communication with God (two-way). Arguing that a person in ancient times was not crazy by applying a standard from thousands of years later is not a very good argument.

Oh, I'm hardly saving the world. I'm just standing on the sidelines, bitching...fearful and wondering when violence will start breaking out in the streets and across the country.

Probably won't, now that the Democrats won't be able to ram things down everybody's collective throat. Well, that is unless they take the normal leftist road of deciding a few eggs must be broken to create the perfect society.

The next thing the left will complain about is that Angle and O'Donnell were merely agents of that fiendishly Macchiavellian Karl Rove, so that the Senate would remain Democrat, and the Republican could continue to blame Obama-Reid for everything.

It's a thought, since nothing can really be achieved until 2013 anyway.

"Robert Cook said... Oh, I'm hardly saving the world. I'm just standing on the sidelines, bitching...fearful and wondering when violence will start breaking out in the streets and across the country."

I don't know how many real bar fights you have been in Robert, but a good general rule is that the people who are the loudest and the nastiest are not the ones you need to worry about. It's the quiet ones who sit there drinking and then all of sudden get up and hit you over the head with a bar stool.

I wouldn't worry too much about people who make a lot of noise on the Internets. You can rest easy buddy. Just sayn'

Trooper York: I never had the bar stool but I did receive a well deserved right hook from someone who had been quietly taking in my bullshit. He got up and walked out. I think I picked up his tab. A long time ago.

They thought it was so cute (Olby was giggling) when Chrissy was questioning Congresswoman Bachman about "will you use the subpeona power to investigate liberals" (note elected Democrats mind you, but liberals) and she didn't take the bait so Chrissy asked her if she was in a trance. She responded by saying that I bet that tingle in your leg feels a little different tonight. And, to top it off, someone was standing behind her with a sign that said Feel the Tingle.

Cutting this or that department - or every department - by 5% will just lock in place the budgetary madness of the last 2 years and will strike people as arbitrary and ill conceived.

They should start by passing a budget based on the 2007 pre-tarp budget. Take the 2007 numbers and project what the normal increases for inflation would have been, if any, and make any adjustments necessary for special circumstances like military operations, disasters, etcetera.

Pass that as a base budget. Let anyone that wants to increase spending from that baseline make their argument from there.

Once the budget baseline has been restored to that already too high level we'll still have substantial deficits due to the economic slowdown but we won't have the children running around with daddy's credit card anymore. Then we can do whatever small bore stimulation (tax cuts) that's necessary or desirable. Passing a budget like that would be defensible to the electorate as a common sense approach.

Before the 111th Congress incoming freshmen senators and representatives were warned to "get along by going along."

That didn't work out so well for a number of freshman and sophomore Democrats who went along with Cap and Trade (cost Rick Boucher his seat in VA-9) and Obamacare (cost Perriello VA-5, not to mention a bunch of otherwise Blue Dog Democrats).

Hope the lesson doesn't get forgotten by Paul, Rubio, and the rest of the newbie Republicans who will soon be looking for housing in Washington, DC.

(Wait until they find out what DC's housing market -- and public schools! -- are like. They may wonder why they bothered filing.)

Gabriel...I believe that Lewis argued that Jesus was either a con man, an insane man, or a Godman acting in fulfillment of the Hebrew prophet's description of Messiah. You seem to be a Renaissance man yourself.You might enjoy Ken Boa, a teacher and a friend of mine that is in C. S. Lewis's class. He has a website of free mp3 archives.

Not for the first time, and not surprisingly, you offer a nonsensical statement.

Let me put into simple terms that a mind like yours might understand. If you claim that America is the land of the middle-class when that construct isn't so years (less than 70 years) and then claim that it won't be around for much longer, then what I'm suggesting for you is to become your own argument. Do you work to subsist or to get ahead? If it's to subsist, then where was your origin point? Clearly you had to start somewhere to amass a modicum of wealth to get to the point you claim to be at now and maintain it? Therefore if you are a subsistence oriented individual, then you have no aspiration of doing anything to move ahead. In that vain, if you are seeing the destruction of the middle class, then you will soon be joining it. In that further vein, you might as well write a check for even more taxes to the IRS and dole your way into poverty along with the rest of the middle class that you claim is headed there. Be the tip of the spear.

Oh, I'm hardly saving the world. I'm just standing on the sidelines, bitching...fearful and wondering when violence will start breaking out in the streets and across the country.

you won't find that much violence in conservative enclaves. However, in the wonderful Utopian communities that your degenerate brethren have created, I'm sure you'll find all the violence you ever wanted or not wanted. You are pathetic, you know that? You have the temerity to proclaim and wait for the oncoming violence when it is you and your kind that have been more responsible for death and destruction mankind in it's totality has ever seen. Fuck you.

The true test of the tea parties viability, as I see it, will be every election from now on.

The spending appetite is not going to change overnight.

I agree with this, but I'd be happier if a focus was put on fraud as well. This country would be completely different, and in to totally different place financially, if a larger emphasis was put on avoiding the Bernie Madoffs, large and small, preying on society. My emphasis on Oprah may seem unhinged but the woman promotes fraud, openly and to the approval of all, accompanied by a bizarre refusal by anyone to acknowledge what's occurring. Barack Obama anyone? We pay a very high price for gullibility.

Its better not to be taken "seriously".

Indeed. You wanna be Rorschach. That's conservatism with Alinsky equalling a decent kind of anarchy.

Like I said yesterday, the only questions now are what do we want? and where do we stop? Hardly a political platform, but unlike the libs, we're just tinkering anyway.

1. The 'partiers aren't capable of or even interested in saving the country. They're separatists, whether they know it or not. They aren't the SuperPatriots they pretend to be (and dress up as), and some of them aren't exactly patriots either. Real patriots don't think that anyone who disagrees with them isn't a patriot. (Yes, that sentence is going to confuse anyone who fell for the teaparties.) Real patriots don't largely ignore immigration for over a year, or largely ignore the Kirk race. (Their response to Kirk makes them as bad as the Dems who supported his opponent.)

2. The partiers are all about the money, and those who have the real money are going to call the tune that they're going to dance to.

For the actual facts about them that you won't hear from Althouse and other TP promoters or from their other opponents, see my extensive Tea Party coverage.

--------------

Necessary note: because teapartiers are vile idiots (see the link) I have to point out that there's a 99% chance that any replies to this comment from 'partiers will be full of lies and smears. That's who they are and what they do. No teapartier has ever been able to present a valid, logical counter-argument to anything I've ever written. Instead, all they can do is lie and smear. That's part of the reason why I encouraged everyone to hold their noses and vote for every one of their opponents. And, I'm basing that on covering politics for over eight years in over 9000 posts. I have never seen a more malignant group than the teapartiers. See the link above for all the details.

Funny thing: I seem to remember seeing that whole last paragraph about 9000 posts under the name of "Lonewacko." Are you trying to rebrand yourself? Because it's not working, for those of us who remember your other identity.

Funny thing: I seem to remember seeing that whole last paragraph about 9000 posts under the name of "Lonewacko." Are you trying to rebrand yourself? Because it's not working, for those of us who remember your other identity.

I really don't believe that all these trolls keep changing their names. I think that it is more likely that they all get their talking points and fallacious facts from the same sources, and that is why so many of them sound like each other.

And then you turned that promising start into a lie by tacking onto it a paragraph of typing that is an even more impenetrable thicket of gibberish than your previous comment, which at least had the sole virtue of brevity.

Ann is a huge supporter of Jim DeMint and is 100% in support of his policies to ban gays (er - sorry - "faggots") from teaching in public schools.

Lovely.

And if you don't believe me - find ONE quote where she has ever condemned Jim DeMint for this stance.

Why does Ann think that her gay son should be banned from teaching? Where does Ann's son fall on the 1-10 scale - where 1 is a normal gay gay and 10 is a child molesting murderer (as the Wall Street Journal editorial page - which Ann so admires - puts it)

Thanks to those who replied for proving my point. Obviously, I'm not trying to hide anything; my comments didn't appear under this name so I tried again using a different name. However, anyone with the intelligence of a turnip would see that the link to my 'partiers coverage - identified as "my" - is the same with both names.

And, Clyde, if you have an actual, valid, logical argument against anything I've written, act like a grown-up and spell it out.